Obesity battle 'starts in the womb'

PREVENTION OF obesity needs to start as early as when a child is in the womb, a leading specialist has said.

“Prevention has to start right back at the antenatal classes,” said consultant endocrinologist Dr Donal O’Shea, who directs the weight management clinic at Dublin’s Loughlinstown Hospital.

“We have to stop kids becoming overweight from the very beginning,” he said. “We have among the fattest children in Europe, and the indicators are that we will have a fatter adult population who will get cancer earlier and diabetes earlier.”

Parents need to be made aware during pregnancy of the importance of maternal nutrition, breastfeeding and early childhood nutrition, he added.

“People are open to messages at that point. If you are told to never give a can of Coke to your child until the age of 12 – otherwise it will increase their risk of cancer – you won’t give it.”

Dr O’Shea was speaking at the weekend after chairing a session on obesity at the Prevention is the Cure conference at Dublin Castle.

Diabetes is expected to rise as the population ages, but obesity is also pushing the levels up, especially among younger people, said University of Edinburgh epidemiologist Dr Sarah Wild, who estimated that around 5 per cent of people in Ireland have diabetes, not all diagnosed.

“We have a way to go before we catch up with the US, but we are showing every sign of aspiring to American levels of obesity,” she said. “The worry is that if we do catch up we will see many more children with type 2 diabetes appearing.”

Dr Wild said that lifestyle intervention such as regular exercise has been proven to help prevent diabetes, but that it was difficult to apply such interventions across the general population.

“The health service has an important role to play and it would be defeatist to say lifestyle is too difficult. But it is crucial that the health service works alongside other policy makers in transport, food and how we plan our cities, to try and make it as easy as possible to follow a healthy lifestyle.”

Looking in “ecological terms” at how the wider environment supports obesity is key to tackling it, said public health expert Prof Geof Rayner from Brunel University.

“It’s not as easy as saying it is just the individuals, it’s about the way we run society,” said Prof Rayner.